we need is a scene.
‘Doc, deep breaths.’
I nod, watching Chris closely as he walks to the counter, orders our drinks, but immediately, this tips me into a panic.
‘I want a black coffee,’ I say. ‘What is he ordering for me? It can only be black.’
‘It’s okay,’ Patricia says. ‘He asked me and I said black coffee. I told him for you.’ She smiles. Soft cheeks, lines opening wide at her eyes. ‘Okay?’
I nod, but inside I am panicking.
Chris is talking to the barista now, easy, light, making random conversation about the bustle of the airport. To give myself something to focus on, I examine his movements, his facial expressions. How easy it seems to come to him, how simple such dialogue appears for him. I try pressing some of it into my memory, the way in which he acts, remember it so I can perhaps use it, mimic it, cover me up. It’s hard to find a place in the world when you don’t know who you’re expected to be.
Done with that yet still anxious, I turn my focus to checking and rechecking the time of our flight to Zurich where Chris has secured us a safe house through his hacking contacts until we can get further away and out of sight. Finally, Chris returns and it’s only then I can be assured that the right drink has been bought. I sip slowly. The liquid is hot, scalding my palate and tongue, but I like it, as if it polishes the tips of my mind so they are ready to be used. Now and then the multiple sights, sounds, smells of the airport hit me, make my body go rigid, but breathing and counting help, and so I do that, run through numbers in my mind, murmur the digits with the tips of my fingers pressed one after the other into my thumb, all the while glancing to my friends, grateful that they are here.
‘Okay, so, I checked my email,’ Chris says, emptying two full sachets of sugar into a latte, ‘and my buddy in Zurich is all set for us to rock up there. All secure. Also, from what I can tell, it looks as if the Alexander woman has read the message we sent her.’
Patricia looks up. ‘What? The Home Secretary?’
‘Yep, Balthus’s wife, Harriet Alexander herself.’ He draws out a computer tablet and taps the screen. ‘About twenty-seven minutes ago. No, wait…twenty-eight minutes ago she read the whole file that reveals the Project Callidus bombshell, from way back in 1973 up to right now.’ He starts listing things off with his fingers. ‘The thousands of Basque blood-type people they’ve been testing on, the cancer drugs for Ines, the Project taking Maria and drugging her, Maria being Balthus’s kid, all of it, all of the stuff we hacked into in Hamburg.’ He grins at us and I wonder if his face has ever, in his life, been fixed into a frown; I resist the temptation to stick my finger into the dimple on his chin.
‘Well,’ Patricia says, ‘hopefully that’ll be it. That’ll be enough for the government to kick-start an investigation into the whole Project bollocks and it’ll finally all be over. No more running.’
‘Can your software connect to her server system?’ I ask.
‘Ah, you’re thinking of hacking into her emails, tracking who she contacts about the subject of our little message. Yep, thought of that. There’s something blocking me at the moment, don’t know what it is yet, but I’m on it.’
We finish our coffee. Chris taps on his computer the whole time and, ten minutes to go until our flight is boarding, he excuses himself to attend the lavatory. I use the spare time to carry out a reassuring check of the contents of my rucksack. One by one, I place them on the table in a neat line: three pay-as-you-go cell phones, two fake passports, money in several denominations, one wash bag, two packets of energy tablets and the other essential items I require to be on the run and hide, all itemised on a list in my head. But it is the last three things that I unpack, that now amid the din and the cappuccino milk steam and the idle chatter around tea-stained tables, that give me the most sense of calm and reassurance: my notebook and two old photographs.
I rest my hand on the worn notebook cover, flick a finger over the dog-eared pages, pages that have housed my thoughts and calculations and mathematical probabilities for years, each spare section crammed with drawings and codes scribbled feverishly after awaking from dreams and nightmares that would jolt some distant, drug induced memory.
Patricia leans in, looks at a page filled with algorithms and coding. ‘I may as well be seeing spots as to understand what on earth all that means.’ She inhales. ‘It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it, Doc? Everything that’s happened.’
I touch the page with my fingertips, let them skim the curve of the equations before me, the lines, the sketches of pencilled memories forgotten and only sometimes remembered. ‘Ines killed Balthus,’ I say, sticking to the facts, unable to express the sorrow I truly feel inside.
‘Yes, Doc, she did.’ Her voice is a soft pillow, a floating feather.
I blink, turn my attention to the two photographs from my bag.
‘Is that your dad with you when you were young? He has the same dark hair and eyes as your brother.’
‘Yes. Except they were never my biological father or brother.’
‘No,’ Patricia says. ‘No, I know. Balthus was your biological father, and that’s hard – you watched him die when you’d only just found out who he really was.’
I swallow. My eyes are a little blurred. ‘Yes.’
Patricia touches the second photograph, this one more sepia-toned and worn. ‘You were a cute baby.’
I take the second image between my fingers and stare. In it stands a woman, my biological mother, long hair falling in wisps around her face, two grainy, willowed hands on the ends of ribbon-thin arms cradling me – her new swaddled baby. I map the skirt that skims the ground where ten toes on bare feet rest on a bed of gravel surrounding a sprawling, stone hospital-come-nunnery with a crucifix on the door. I blink at the photograph and battle with a feeling inside me, strange and unwelcome. Anger and sadness, a tumbleweed of sorrow that, try as I might, will not go, but instead rolls along the barren land of my heart and mind, leaving behind trails in the sand that vanish with one whip of the wind. Isabella Bidarte – my real mother. I try the phrase out in my head, wear it like a new pair of shoes, walk it up and down the corridors of my mind, but it feels odd, stiff, as if using it for too long would create a blister filled with pus that would burst and seep and hurt.
I turn the photograph in my hands. On the back is scribbled an address and the geolocation coordinates of a hospital – Weisshorn Psychiatric Hospital, the place Isabella was last kept in Geneva, and next to it the date of her death, all etched out by my Papa and hidden from Ines before he died.
Patricia stares at it. ‘He knew she was kept there, didn’t he, your dad? He’d found out about what Ines was doing – getting the cancer drugs to keep her alive in exchange for you.’
Too sad to speak, I trace the address and date with my fingertips as, to the right of the café, a television repeats a news feed detailing the killings at Mama’s apartment.
‘A triple homicide was reported in Madrid, in what is being cited as a cartel crime. Spanish lawyer and member of parliament Ines Villanueva; her lawyer son, Ramon Martinez; and a British prison chief, Balthus Ochoa, have all been implicated in what sources are saying is a decade-long fraud ring stretching into millions of dollars and which includes trafficking in illegal medical drugs. The bodies of the three were found at Villanueva’s central Madrid house this afternoon. Villanueva, who was a likely
